“The only way to truly gauge a customer’s perception of your company is to hear it straight from them. Insights from social analytics rendered within the CRM environment helps operators understand potential issues as well as their sentiment and mood and of their customers and can make customer interaction more meaningful, efficient, and effective,” said Järtby.

Hello again, old friend.

What was once not much more than a rudimentary way to manage contact information has now become a hinge pin in service provider operations. CRM is now an integral component of service providers IT environment and leveraging it can take all that makes each CSP truly unique and use it to personalize their customer’s experience. Microsoft’s platform provides a rich and dynamic foundation of functionality while Ericsson’s Telecom CRM helps make better sense of OSS, BSS and network insights to create a truly innovative vertical solution to perfectly fit into the telecom environment.

“CRM is where it all comes together, all this converges in CRM,” Järtby surmises. “The value of CRM is taking vast amounts of data and turning it into meaningful information in a way that can be leveraged easily by CSP for their specific purposes. CRM should be seen as an orchestrator. It has to talk the telco language.”

As an old marketer from days gone by, it’s good to see CRM come into its own. It’s like seeing an old friend finally make it big – and it’s about time. More specifically, now is the time for the customer relationship to be the focal point for those that serve them, both philosophically and operationally, and companies like Ericsson and Microsoft have made that possibility a tangible reality today.